By Steve Hynd
Nuke wonks Joseph Cirincione and Elise Connor have a great essay over at FP magazine today on the hype surrounding Iran's nuclear program.
Bottom line: IF Iran decided to cross the line and develop a nuke then it is about five years away from a deliverable short range weapon and around a decade away from anything that could reach CONUS.
But I'd like to take issue with the"IF". The two write in their FP piece:
Iran is certainly moving to acquire the technology that would enable it to make a weapon. But, as a 2009 Joint Threat Assessment by the EastWest Institute concludes, "[I]t is not clear whether [Iran] has taken the decision to produce nuclear weapons. "The regime must weigh the political and security costs of developing nuclear weapons before moving ahead. And Iran might decide, like Japan, that its needs are best served by approaching the threshold of building a bomb (acquiring the technical capability and know-how) but not actually crossing the line and risking an arms race among its rivals or a pre-emptive attack from the United States or Israel.
"Nobody knows if Iran has taken this decision," Sharon Squassoni, director of the Proliferation Prevention Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told Agence France-Press on June 28. "It's more in their interest to have this ambiguity."
I suppose I shouldn't be amazed that American experts and pundits continually ignore the fact that Iran's Ali Larijani, Majlis Speaker and former chief nuclear negotiator, has been entirely unambiguous about Iran's aims. Mehr News Agency reported on the 25th February this year:
Majlis Speaker Ali Larijani has stated that Iran will follow the Japanese model in its nuclear program. Japan has nuclear technology but does not possess any nuclear weapons and Iran will follow the same path in its nuclear program, Larijani said in a meeting with Japanese House of Councilors President Satsuki Eda in Tokyo on Wednesday.
By the way, the "Japan Option" is entirely legal within the NPT's framework.
Cirincione ends his piece:
So the next time you hear a pundit claiming that Iran is on the verge of attaining nuclear weapons, don't panic. Like the boy who cried wolf, those pundits might eventually be right. For now, however, Iran has a ways to go -- and keeping that in mind is the best way to develop a measured response to the Islamic Republic's nuclear ambitions.
Maybe keeping Larijani's statement in mind would help too.
I've been opining for many years that this would seem the most likely policy they'd follow, though, of course, one can never be absolutely sure about what people might decide in future. But, yes, given that it seems such a plausible outcome that could potentially last decades, no need to panic.
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